I'm a bottom-up learner - like bottom-up parsers (as opposed to top-down parsers) I like to get my facts as detailed as possible and then work my way up to more general topics. For example, when I learned my backup & recovery skills, I learned about block internals first as opposed to diving in all sorts of high level commands.

I found out about the book a couple of months ago as Daniel Fink told me he was reviewing this book - I immediately ordered it on Craig's site before it was available on Amazon.

I must admit, I've only read chapters 6, 7 and 8 - covering buffer cache internals, redo internals and shared pool internals. These are 3 chapters every dba should read !!! Those 3 chapters are worth the price on their own !